The title of the quietly haunting new film, Miroirs No. 3, comes from a piano piece by Ravel that beautifully evokes the movements of a boat sailing in the ocean. It's no surprise that such music would appeal to the superb German filmmaker Christian Petzold; in movies like the enigmatic refugee drama Transit or the watery modern-day fairy tale Undine, he loves to focus on characters who are lonely and adrift.
Miroirs is also the French word for "mirrors," and that meaning resonates throughout the new movie, which is full of mysterious reflections and distortions. There are also deliberate echoes of great movies past. Petzold is famously obsessed with film noir, and watching his work can sometimes make you feel like you're wandering through that labyrinth of mirrors at the end of The Lady From Shanghai. That's a very good thing.
Miroirs No. 3 begins in Berlin, where we meet a young woman named Laura, played by Petzold's frequent collaborator Paula Beer. Laura doesn't say much, but we can tell, from her piercing stare, that she's profoundly unhappy — and her boyfriend, Jakob, doesn't seem to be helping.
Jakob is an inconsiderate partner and, it turns out, a reckless driver; one day, as they're speeding through the countryside in his cherry-red convertible, he crashes the car and is instantly killed. Laura, though, miraculously survives with just a minor scrape.
A middle-aged woman named Betty, who lives near the crash site, comes to her rescue, and after a medical exam, Laura asks if, instead of going to the hospital, she can stay on and recuperate at Betty's house. Betty immediately says yes; she's played by the wonderful actor Barbara Auer, and you can tell, just from how the two women look at each other, that a close and instinctual bond has developed.
One of the oddball pleasures of Miroirs No. 3 is how readily we accept what’s happening, even though Petzold withholds — and only gradually reveals — significant information about his characters.Justin Chang
One of the oddball pleasures of Miroirs No. 3 is how readily we accept what's happening, even though Petzold withholds — and only gradually reveals — significant information about his characters. We have little sense of who Laura is, or whether she has any friends or family; in time, we learn that she is studying to be a classical pianist.
Betty proves similarly elusive, though we do meet her husband, Richard, and their grown son, Max, who work together at an auto garage nearby. They're somewhat estranged from Betty for tragic reasons that eventually come into focus: Betty and Richard had a daughter who's now dead, but who seems to have had a lot in common with Laura, right down to their shared love of the piano.
But the music that you might remember best from Miroirs No. 3 isn't a classical piece; it's the 1972 song "The Night," by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, which plays in the garage one day when Max and Laura are hanging out. It's a joyous song, but it's also a tale of romantic caution, as though warning these two acquaintances not to get any closer.
What I love about Petzold's movies is that, although they're very much tethered to the real world, they're not afraid to embrace implausibility, coincidence and even hints of the supernatural. He has the head of a realist and the heart of a fantasist — or maybe it's the other way around.
Petzold also loves the conventions of classic Hollywood filmmaking and clearly believes they can speak powerfully to the audiences of today. In Miroirs No. 3, the notion of Laura serving as a stand-in for a deceased woman is clearly a riff on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, one of Petzold's favorite films. The protagonist's name also reminded me of one of my favorite films, the 1944 Otto Preminger classic Laura, which also has a memorable back-from-the-dead element.
But you don't have to spot these allusions to feel captivated and moved by the story that Petzold is telling. The surrogate-family bonds that Laura forms with Betty — and, in time, with Richard and Max — are undeniably therapeutic, and Petzold suggests there's something precious about these connections, even if they are built on a shared delusion. In showing us characters who feel the ache of love and loss, and who dream of a second chance, Petzold holds up a mirror to us all.
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